[Galaxy S Advance I9070 General] arkadeep94:
Short Review of Indian Firmware

Hey guys, its been about 27 hours since I made the jump to JellyBean from Gingerbread. I am an Indian and hence I used Kies to upgrade my phone. I am on stock DDULP8 firmware.

Here are my first impressions:

First boot was really slow. It felt that my device was a hundred years old. I use ADW launcher and immediately disabled Touchwizz. That helped with the lag but general slow downs and hiccups were everywhere.

Earlier on gingerbread, I used to have 3 minimalistic text widgets, circle battery widget and simple calender widget all active but till managed to have to have about 150 MB or RAM free. Free RAM is virtually non existent on JellyBean with RAM usage crossing 540MB at any point of time without even doing anything.

The dialer application showed the highest amount of lag. So much so that I was forced to use a third party application to use my phone as...well as a phone. Once the stock dialler opened however, I was able to use everything smoothly. It was like every thing I wanted to do, needed some amount of time as warm up.

Now to the settings application. There is a definite amount of time lag when I click on anything. The animation of the option is very rough and although the next screen does show up properly, such lag on click animation of a system application like settings should not have been there.

Hence, again, other than these really annoying small hiccups here and there in simple navigation, its fine to use. This is because once an app or a menu does open up, everything works as it should. Scrolling is smooth thanks to JellyBean's project butter. Sticky almost and I say that in a nice way. But another sore point is scrolling in whatsapp. especially when you have several chats in the main window. It is rough, jagged and downright ugly. Sure, I probably do have about thirty or forty chats in that window, but such frame drops were not present when I used GB.

Another huge gripe about the JellyBean update is that multitasking is absolutely horrible. I had to open the developer options and restrict to 2 background processes to be able to get any kind of performance out of my phone at all. Sometimes, the problem is so aggravated that everything on the screen just freezes and I cant do anything other than reboot. Also, a very glaring performance issue is that Whatsapp sometimes needs to close due to multitasking. That is, when I switch back to it after using the browser or any other application. I found this to be the biggest fault. I mean, laughable almost seeing that my phone can't handle 2 rudimentary operations.

As for games, I tried temple run 2. The game lagged. Sometimes it ran smooth but for the most part there were some severe frame drops which made the game unplayable. Cut the Rope, Stick Tennis and Hill Climb racing run smooth. Thankfully.

YouTube, GMail and Maps work satisfactorily. Though Maps could and should have been much smoother.

Performance in facebook and facebook messenger is great. That is, when they are running alone on your phone. What I mean to say is that having a conversation on chat head along with having whatsapp open is pretty much impossible. I had to reboot my phone twice because of that issue. These never happened when I was using GB.

As for battery life, I can't comment yet considering its only been a day. But from what I have noticed, its fine. I don't really have any complaints regarding that.

So, conclusively, JB or stock JB is poorly made and quite simply out of place on our phone. Samsung should have done a better job. But again, I'm not the only one to say that am I? :P

Users who do not know about custom kernel or ROMs will be frustrated if they do choose to upgrade and they will want to go back to GB.

That is highly unfortunate because JB was supposed to breathe a new life into our phones, not squeeze its throat and make it die.

Out of all this, I have only come to realize as to how important custom ROMs and Kernels are for an Android phone when OEMs are the biggest idiots of the lot. :D

Hence, thank you all! To every dev/modder/themer or anyone who has made any sort of contribution to make this phone work well, I have the highest amount of respect for you guys.

Root -> custom kernel, here I come. B)